Word: workmanly
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...celebrity-studded staff of last fall's hit parody Not the New York Times is back, this time with a send-up of tomorrow's news, The 80s: A Look Back at the Tumultuous Decade 1980-1989. Due out next month, the 288-page, large-format book (Workman Publishing; $14.95; paperback $6.95) offers a fantastical but not utterly implausible history of "hot years, cold years, big years, little years, sweet years, sour years, yes-years, no-years...
...these improbable doings be lost. The result is that Peter Sellers, in the key double role, must play his part as the substitute king very straight. In this version he is not a gentleman, but a London hansom cab driver. Sellers makes something quite affecting of this honest workman, intruding his democratic values and lower-class common sense on Middle European court politics at the turn of the century. Sellers must save his best comic efforts for the prince's role. He makes him into a perfect twit, a gambling, womanizing, cowardly wastrel, complete with an absolutely splendid lisp...
Take simply the matter of visual style. His early films had a good workman's lack of clutter, and since Allen was almost as fond of visual parody as he was of the verbal kind, they showed an ability to ape the masters. Beginning with Sleeper (1973), a conscious coherence, a striving for a certain elegance came into his films, growing through Love and Death (1975), becoming lush and nicely jumbled in Annie Hall (1977), turning austere to the point of being mannered in Interiors...
Experience shows that such safety features work. In 1975, a workman using a candle to test for air leaks accidentally started an electrical fire in the Browns Ferry nuclear plant at Athens, Ala. The fire short-circuited cables controlling the primary cooling system, causing loss of some of the nuclear-core cooling water. But nothing even close to a meltdown ensued. Although one of the back-up cooling systems was also disabled, technicians used other emergency circuits to cool the reactor down long before the situation approached the critical stage...
...three wishes," Carpenter said in an interview last year for sight and Sound magazine, "one of them would be 'Send me back to the 40s and the studio system and let me direct movies."' Carpenter's cunning proficiency, the workman like spit and polish of his low budget productions and his obvious debt to and affection for earlier movie-makers have tempted a number of critics to consider him a clever contemporary heir to several 40s and 50s directors whose exciting grade-B films have been sauvely generalized under the label film noir. Just now, with the success of Halloween...